Around the World in 80 Dates Written, filmed and photographed by Samuel
Bradford
Apparently I’m having a quarter life crisis. The day before
I left London for Beijing was my 32 birthday and I’ve taken
a gap year from my telly job to see the World. I had another quarter
life crisis a few years ago after a messy break-up and backpacked
around South America to re-boot my system but this time I thought
I’d do it slightly differently. Like the rest of the best
I've been dabbling with the facebook, my-space, inter-networking
dating thing when I realised that my 2 favorite pass-times, traveling
and women could be easily and effectively combined via the medium
of the internet. In theory it’s the perfect way to explore
a new country, its culture, language, people and sites and to
meet beautiful and exotic women in the process. Who needs a guidebook
when you've got a date? The following experiment is aimed at proving
my theory to be correct.
So first I had to pick a country. I targeted China because I'd
never been there and always wanted to go. It seems like as alien
and as exotic a culture that I could think of, plus they've got
the whole Olympic scene and the fastest growing economy on the
planet with 15 Yuan to the pound, which is nice. Oh and I guess
it’s only fair to mention that I contracted a mild dose
of Yellow fever since my Korean girlfriend dumped me a few weeks
ago and I still cant get those oriental eyes out of my head.
Next I had to join a few dating sites. There are loads that specifically
cater for China so I filled out the profiles with a fair degree
of honesty with regard to my personal details, 5'9, blue eyes,
brown hair what’s left of it, TV career, boyish good looks
etc but also included details regarding the nature of my "experiment"
in combining internet dating with travel. I cut and pasted my
picture looking lush.
Once approved, I went on the prowl. Within hours I contacted
about 50 Chinese ladies
and even started to be contacted spontaneously from many more.
The initial stages were very exciting and by about 7am the next
morning I realised that I’d better calm down
and get some rest. When I next logged on I had at least 100 emails
to respond to and the whole thing started to snowball from there.
More pics were exchanged and web cam conversations conducted,
flirtations, chat-room seductions, and within a week I had procured
the phone numbers of the girls that I’d literally clicked
with.
I was so inspired by this initial response that I decided to
take it one step further. I've been a freelance cameraman for
the past few years so naturally saw the potential to make a movie
but this posed many practical and ethical questions; I couldn’t
just turn up to these dates with a camera crew as that would obviously
fundamentally undermine the experiment as well as make my dates
run a mile. A compromise would be to film myself but sporting
a camera on a first date could have equally disastrous results
as well as being, let’s face it... rude and sad, and then
there is the question of consent. The solution however was simple
and the responses alarming. Honesty it turns out is the best policy.
I simply told the truth and explained that I wanted to film the
dates for a documentary experiment about combining internet dating
and traveling. I expected to get a few drop outs, but they all
loved it and even started to suggest the best visual locations
that we could film the dates together.
So now all I had to do was get there and that’s exactly
what I did.
Its time to put the theory into practice:
Around the world in 80 dates… part 1
Over the past 10 years Samuel
Bradford has worked in almost every aspect of the
film and television industries in a diverse range of productions
from “The Adam and Joe Show” to feature-length
horror and most recently concentrating on Travel documentaries
and HD camera operation. www.aroundtheworldfilms.tv
